Dos artículos largos en el Daily Telegraph de hoy. Los dos periodistas son comentaristas económicos y a veces subo sus articulos al hilo ppcc. Hoy hablan lógicamente del confinamiento (light pero no tan light) que comienza el jueves en UK por cuatro semanas (a no ser que haya una sorpresa en el Parlamento antes del jueves). El Telegraph es un periódico conservador y la linea editorial está en contra del confinamiento (y de la UE). Pero por otro lado sus lectores son maduritos.
Los copio enteros porque están detrás de un paywall. Disculpad los ridículamente grandes gráficos pero no se como reducirlos.
http://m.email3.telegraph.co.uk/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%40rg0DhYI5YNLifXLe%2BViN0M8w8QVDIqL3vPFPkbaqTOY%3D&WT.mc_id=e_DM1302056&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_EIn_New&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_EIn_New20201103&utm_campaign=DM1302056Boris has my full support on lockdown 2.0 - even though I think he's wrong
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,
International Business EditorAt the risk of being shockingly unfashionable, I think the Prime Minister’s health response to the second wave of Covid-19 has been defensible and plausibly proportionate. This is my reluctant conclusion, even though I also think that the Sage committee is over-egging the dangers and has no scientific basis for projecting 4,000 deaths a day in extremis.
Boris Johnson has had to navigate between the opposing monsters of Scylla and Charybdis, and make instant judgments in a cloud of imperfect knowledge and shifting circumstances. Much of the recent criticism has been shrill, intellectually dishonest, or lacks international perspective. Breathless talk of a humiliating “volte-face” or a “Suez Moment” is Westminster infantilism. Leaders across Europe are having to abandon their plans and hit the same “nuclear button”, and they are doing so because their hospitals are being overrun. This is what can happen in a pandemic dealing with a novel virus that keeps throwing up wicked surprises.
The UK's increase in cases is not as severe as rises elsewhere in Europe
Those accusing the Government of waiting too long to impose a second lockdown - and repeating the error of March - overstate a complex case and misjudge the social mood. They do not acknowledge that the Government has until this week been pursuing the current policy of the World Health Organisation and is at least trying to cleave to best practice in Europe. It was entirely reasonable - arguably optimal policy - for Downing Street to take a wait-and-see approach this autumn, opting for a traffic light policy of regional tiers as the first line of defence. That is what Germany, Austria, France, and others were doing until the constantly changing balance of risk forced their hand over recent days.
It is also WHO policy. “We’re calling for local, targeted, proportionate measures. National lockdowns are absolutely the last resort. We have to look at the collateral damage to society and the economy,” said the WHO's Europe director, Hans Kluge, just days ago. The WHO pushed for drastic measures in March because the virus was spreading exponentially and healthcare systems were cracking. It is not more nuanced today because we face a finer judgment call.
This is not wave one all over again. Wave two has a different character. The case fatality rate is now lower. The curve trajectory of the pandemic is flatter. A study by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) found that the death rate for Covid patients in UK hospitals has fallen to 1.5pc from 6pc in the very different situation of early April, when the National Health Service was caught off guard and staff were short of critical supplies. Such data must be treated with caution. There are time-lags and countless variables. Yet it is clear that doctors and nurses have learned fast how to fight this disease, with anticoagulants, steroids, and earlier use of oxygen. Germany’s top virologist thinks masks have cut the viral load, giving the immune system a head start for those who are infected.
The Prime Minister was right to overrule Sage when it called for a circuit-breaker lockdown five weeks ago. At that juncture the country would not have swallowed extreme measures and a suspension of basic freedoms on the basis of theoretical models. As he stated in early October - correctly - a second lockdown would be a “disaster”.
Note that Sage has swung from one extreme to the other. In February it flirted with herd immunity, even though the epidemiological imperative for a lockdown was overwhelming at that moment. It has now reinvented itself as the apostle of zero-tolerance when the imperative is weaker. A two-week closure in September would have been no panacea in any case. “It is kicking the can down the road. We know that as soon as we open up again, the infections rise,” said Jason Oke, one of the authors of the CEBM study and an expert on UK epidemiology at Oxford. “Sage are apocalyptic about this and their models keep exaggerating the rise in cases. The graphs over the weekend had eight different ‘R’ rates that weren’t internally consistent, and some of the figures were three weeks out of date,” he said.
Dr Oke said the Government should have held its nerve and persevered with its three-tier regional policy. “Shutting down North Devon is not going to help Manchester or Liverpool,” he said. Personally, I agree. My preference at this point is for a light-touch ‘Swedish’ approach. Yet it is also self-evident that the UK is not Sweden. The level of social conformity is lower. Population density, obesity, and vitamin deficiency are all higher in the UK. Above all, the Prime Minister has suddenly been faced with the spectacle of Belgium, which has seen its 14-day cumulative average of cases rocket to 1,735 per 100,000. This has occurred even though Belgium was a cauldron of infection in the spring. Clearly it was wishful thinking to suppose that high sero-prevalence from wave one would act as a partial fire-break in wave two.
The rate in France has spiraled to 771, enough to overwhelm hospitals in 13 French departments. The number of critical care beds taken by Covid patients has hit 100pc from the Loire to the Alps. In Seine-et-Marne it has hit 134pc. Nationwide, the figure has reached 71pc. The country is approaching the sort of grim choices faced by Italy’s Provincia di Bergamo in March when doctors had to choose who to save, and who should be left to die. In August I poked fun at Mr Johnson’s quarantine policy for travellers coming from France, so I must eat my words.
The UK rate is hovering at 469. It may be stabilising but that is far from assured and hard experience has taught how quickly the trajectory can spin out of control. As the Prime Minister warned, the rise in UK cases has already exceeded the “worst case” scenario and we face the risk of a winter bloodbath. So we pick our poison. Militant opponents of any serious counter-measures err on the other side, clutching at straws and every mountebank pre-print (before peer-review) promising some magic solution. There seems to be an incurable hope that life and commerce would somehow return to normal if the authorities got out of the way and let the virus more or less run its course.
It is the timeless fallacy of ignoring the counterfactual. The economy would stall anyway because people would batten down the hatches to protect themselves.My question for Nigel Farage as he launches his anti-lockdown party - or indeed for Tory backbenchers plotting mutiny - is how a policy of shielding the vulnerable can in fact work. Is he aware of the mounting corpus of research - by the Host Genetics Initiative, for example - showing that substantial segments of the population have genetic variants and chromosome disequilibria that leave them easy prey for this virus? Their cytokine and interferon signaling goes wrong.
Since we have not mapped the genetic profile of the nation - though it would not be that costly or difficult to do so, for the next pandemic - we do not know who these people are. They may be any one of us. There is no way of shielding them. So do we throw these people under a bus for our convenience or in the cause of Benthamite utilitarianism and better GDP? Surely not.
The failure of Britain’s Covid response is by now a well-rehearsed theme. It is bitterly disappointing that the test and trace regime has been such a shambles, but then Holland, France, and a string of other countries have each had their own comparable debacles. It takes intrusive surveillance and enforcement to pull off successful tracking in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Once the virus has gained a foothold it is probably too late in any case. But that is water under the bridge, a matter for future enquiries. Right now we are at a potentially dangerous moment. Her Majesty’s Government deserves a little more support even in its errors, and a little less self-indulgent criticism from armchair virologists.
Pope Francis let rip over the weekend against the “facile blowhards” (declaracionistas) contaminating public discourse. He fulminated against “those who think only about themselves, who protest or complain about restrictive measures”, with a cool disregard for those most vulnerable to the pandemic. Quite so, Your Holiness. We all need to get a grip.
There is a way out of this mess, if only we could grasp it
By Jeremy Warner,
Assistant EditorFrom relatively early in the Covid pandemic, I've been something of a lockdown sceptic.
I use the rider “something of” because I wouldn't want to be lumped in with Covid deniers; the disease is real, highly contagious, and deadly for a significant minority of mainly elderly people. The evidence is clear on this; to refute it is to side with conspiracy theorists.
I would also take issue with many of those who have been challenging the validity of the data. The statistics are never going to be perfect - often they are backward-looking, reflecting the world as it was, rather than as it is - but there is a whiff of anti-science about those who repeatedly say the official data lies; it is not at all helpful to the exercise of rational government, and again compounds the idea of some sort of conspiracy.
Ministers may be getting it wrong, but it is ridiculous to suggest they are doing it deliberately in order to usher in some kind of authoritarian state. It genuinely hurts Boris Johnson to be doing this stuff, which goes against every libertarian fibre in his body.
Modelling of the numbers to extrapolate and predict the future is obviously more open to question. Some particularly alarmist examples of such modelling have been cited by Government advisers to support the case for renewed national lockdown. But most of this modelling seems plausible enough to me.
Like demographic forecasting, epidemiological prediction tends to be somewhat more reliable than its economic counterpart, which as John K Galbraith once memorably said, makes astrology look respectable. Population growth and disease contagion, on the other hand, tend to follow well worn, and therefore reasonably predictable, patterns.
Policy has to be based on what we know to be true, and what the evidence suggests is likely to be true in future, rather than what we would wish it to be.
Three slightly positive straws in the wind; the overall R rate in the UK seems to be subsiding even before the new lockdown comes into force, suggesting that earlier restrictions and voluntary behavioural responses may already be having some effect, and the rise in Covid hospitalisations seems to be abating somewhat.
We'll get an update on this today, but there also seems to have been little in the way of excess deaths this time around, suggesting that Covid deaths are merely substituting for normal, seasonal flu deaths. If that's the case, you have to question whether the current hysteria is in any way justified.
As it is, the Government plainly made mistakes in not taking the disease sufficiently seriously in the early stages of the pandemic, and has continued to make key errors ever since. But I wouldn't include in this catalogue of incompetence the sin of over optimism, or taking into consideration in determining policy the harm that lockdown strategies impose on livelihoods, wellbeing and the economy at large.
It was reasonable to hope that the disease was largely under control going into the summer months, so therefore right to ease the restrictions. As for concern over general wellbeing and the economy, this must always be weighed in the balance in deciding what approach to take.
If the cure is worse than the disease, then the treatment must cease. There is growing evidence to suggest this is likely to be the case with renewed forms of lockdown.
For the great bulk of people, putting food on the table is a much bigger concern than a virus that for the majority causes only mild discomfort if any symptoms at all. There is, however, a world of a difference between this kind of lockdown scepticism and simply attempting to rubbish the science on which lockdown policy is based.
One of the main reasons cited for renewed social restrictions is the perceived need to "protect our NHS" from being overwhelmed. Oddly, you might think, an NHS which is meant to protect us from disease now needs protecting against disease from us.
Quite why this would be the case, when the NHS has had the entire summer to prepare for an anticipated second wave, is a failing all of its own. We are told that the deficiency is less in the physical capacity of hospitals themselves than the healthcare workers to man them.
Can this really be true? We all know of healthcare specialists who spent the first lockdown essentially not working because the hospitals were supposedly so full of Covid sufferers that other treatments had to be suspended to make way for the pandemic. Capacity constraints therefore seem as much a question of logistical deficiencies as actual shortfalls.
In any case, what really spooked the UK Government was not so much the predicted rising death toll as projections that Covid hospitalisations would soon swamp the NHS's ability to cope. Again the numbers on this are pretty convincing. In little more than a month, the number of hospital beds occupied by Covid sufferers has gone from around 2000 to 9295 at the last count.
Better treatments mercifully mean that fewer are dying than last time around, and a fair number of hospitals, particularly in the South are still operating at well below the first wave peak in terms of Covid patients.
But 10 hospital trusts, according to data presented by Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, are already above it. The direction of travel is unmistakable. Hospitalisations from Covid are rising almost everywhere.
Covid hospitalisations are rising at sharp rate as winter approaches
Severe cases of Covid-19 are set to outnumber hospital capacity by late November
The economics of a second lockdown already look dire, with the UK economy, having been on a strong V-shaped recovery trajectory, expected to contract by a further 3.3pc in the final quarter of this year, according to the latest forecasts from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, and the corresponding extension of furlough likely to add another £30bn to £40bn to the deficit. We plainly cannot keep carrying on like this.
Anything from the office of our former Prime Minister Tony Blair tends to be dismissed as tainted advice these days, yet his latest set of suggestions on the Covid response make a great deal of sense and do potentially offer a way off this dispiriting treadmill of ever more economically devastating lockdowns. One is to fast track developmental vaccines and therapies that we already know to be safe, even if their efficacy is still questionable, into mass usage. There is little point in hanging around. The other is regular mass testing, particularly of educational establishments and healthcare workers, but virtually everyone by the end of the year; whatever the costs, it will be as nothing compared with that of repeated lockdowns. Such ideas are very much in line with what the Government is trying to do, particularly with mass testing of the population regardless of whether symptomatic or not, which is already being trialled in Liverpool.
To these suggestions I would add a third, which may be painful, unwanted, and involve a high degree of police state-like surveillance, but plainly does work to judge by its application among a number of Asian countries that have been successful in suppressing the virus within their own borders. All arrivals in the UK must be isolated away from home in designated hotels for the established, safe quarantine of two weeks - no exceptions, no lax enforcement, no public transport from the airport, no disappearing off into the community - for as long as it takes for the virus to subside internationally.
Let's try something that works, for a change. If we waste the next month as we did the first lockdown, we'll again be back at square one at some stage in the first quarter of next year. By then, both the fiscal and economic position might well be beyond repair.
